Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Explore and Extract Social Data For Brand Building

Author:Suraj Arukil About the Author:CEO/Founder of Nuvento ( a technology firm
that specializes in Business Intelligence and Software Architecture.)

Social media sites foster conversations. People visit these sites to interact; share their candid thoughts and opinions about their social experiences with their family and friends.

Enterprises using social media in their brand development strategies have much to gain from these conversations because these conversations provide useful actionable insights on a plethora of business aspects – from market research to consumer/brand engagement, social recommenders, information filtering, or expertise location.

For example, an individual who has applied for a home loan could share on the social channels, his experience with his service bank and several other banks. Subsequent data from these conversations could revolve around interest rates, processing fees, repayment options, loan transfer rules, EMI etc.

Banks and other financial services looking to expand their target market or improving customer engagement initiatives can extract these specific social data for business benefits by using competent social media analysis tools. For a financial institution, the benefits include getting insights on customers’ needs and requirements in financial services including individual customer’s likes and preferences, identifying products and services that require improvements and developing new personalized products to suit customer needs. Moreover, institutions can also analyze their competitor’s strategies in similar area and make improvisations to their marketing plans.

Social conversations can provide enterprises across industries – from finance and insurance to retail and entertainment with critical business intelligence. Understanding the value of these social data, extracting it and using it in better decision making will leverage business success. As businesses and brands abandon passive listening for active and highly engaging interactions with their customers and fan base, today’s business enterprises need broader social media analytics tools that can optimize these interactions. Shout Analytics is one such new-age social media analysis product that uses advanced NLP algorithms and is based on the latest technology stack that can handle up to 7-8 terabytes of data.